I have serious doubts about the wisdom of groups like Anonymous. Standing behind the banner of a mass movement, of populism itself, is a cop out. Anonymous has no Cause, except anonymism itself. This can be formulated alternatively as the fight for non-identity, for nothingness, for symbolic death. It is the fight for the pure anti-thesis. The movement has no leader, not even local, distributed ones. It’s hard to see what new program it could put in place, other than a destructive, pseudo-democratic “blind eye,” which, in what is perhaps the greatest irony, recalls the ubiquitous personification of The Market as the ultimate Leader and decider of our fate.

Hegemonizing a universal means standing for a particular cause and asserting it as universally relevant. (See this article by Jacques Rancière on defining the political). The way I think of it, taking to the streets with the message of anonymity is the purest form of being, versus thought, in Lacan’s formulation of the two — “I think where I am not, therefore, I am where I do not think.”

All that is just to say that standing for universality itself is disingenuous. It is a dissimulation of the fact that one stands for nothing in particular, or, rather, just the whole series of all the particular interests involved, instead of some particulars taken to be Universal. Exemplary on this point is a recent Daily Show video in which Michael Moore reduces the Occupy Wall Street movement to a variety of subcultures, sub-interests (or sub-speech-genres, as Rob puts it), not — and of course we should be ashamed for even thinking this! — any one, universal demand. Standing for everything is an excuse to stand for nothing. This is all certainly relevant to the discussion of JJ’s piece on Post-Populism as well, where you’ll find Rob’s point about speech genres in the comments.

History reaches the pinnacle of irony in movements like Anonymous. They are no one, and yet they are everyone; they have no cause, and yet everyone is participating. The properly universal, political, and revolutionary position is the exact opposite: we are everyone, and yet no one; we are nothing but our Cause, and thus we are no person at all (even the leader is driven not by personal interests but by the Cause of the movement); yet we are a Universal movement, and as such we stand for every particular person (rather than every particular cause/interest).

An interesting, and perhaps unnoticed, implication of the shrinking away from any Cause today is that the nature of humility has changed. People shift their skepticism from themselves onto the Cause itself; whereas people used to be skeptical about their own importance in a society in which the highest form of life was to sacrifice for a Cause outside oneself, today we have the opposite, such that people are skeptical about nothing but the Cause. I take this point from Orthodoxy, a book by G. K. Chesterton; a brief series of quotes on this can be found here.

But the greatest insight to draw from anonymist protestors is quite different. I’ll take a page from Badiou’s book. The being-multiple of the situation in the streets (the whole set of possibilities) has reached such a full state of expression that one can easily read off from the situation its key motivation: we see protestors everywhere shouting about their problems with the financial industry and a host of other phenomena that can point to nothing other than capitalism as their source. The simplest way to put this is that capitalism is now THE elephant in the room, except in this case, not everyone sees it.

Contra Moore, Occupy Wall Street is obviously — as even the name indicates! — NOT a fight for nothing in particular. It is a movement to end financial speculation. At its best, it could become a movement to end capitalism itself.

The ultimate challenge to the Anonymous movement as a political movement can be summarized in the simple question, Could we ever elect an anonymist leader?